Antal Szerb: Oliver VII

“The whole country is here,” the King exclaimed. “What is this?”

“Oliver!” Ortrud said petulantly. “There’s going to be another revolution. Another revolution, and then … ”

“Nonsense!” the King said, with a wave of the hand, and went to the internal telephone.

“Colonel Mawiras-Tendal please.”

A moment later the Colonel stood before them.

“What’s going on out there?” the King asked.

“The Princess’ mother, the Gracious Empress Hermina, arrived unexpectedly this evening. Dr Delorme quickly got together a little crowd to celebrate, and now they are marching to the railway station to greet her. I was just about to inform Your Highness.”

Marcelle and Sandoval were walking in the hoary forest of Dinant, in whose deeps Merlin the magician lies somewhere asleep, still working his spells.

“Isn’t it beautiful here?” said Sandoval.

“Very beautiful. Let’s sit for a bit; I’m tired.”

They sat down, and for a long time were silent. Sandoval was working on a composition in his head. “Brown”, he thought, “then a little red over there … this tree is particularly fine.” Then his glance fell on Marcelle’s face. It was distant, thoughtful.

“Tell me,” he asked suddenly. “Do you still miss Oscar?”

“Me?” she asked, alarmed. “Yes. No. No, truly no. Because I know very well that we could never be right for each other.”

“No? But you were so good together: like two lovebirds.”

“Yes, that’s true. But that’s because somehow I always knew there was something strange about him.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know, at first I thought he was a little bit stupid. But now I realise, he was always just a king.”

ANTAL SZERB’S LAST NOVEL, written just two or three years before his appalling death in 1944, is his most thoroughly genial. The sly wit, benign good humour and capacity to surprise us at every turn are not new to his writing, but the sunniness of its view of humankind is. Devised in a world of tramping jackboots, the setting and tone have more in common with the Bohemia of The Winter’s Tale than with Hitler’s Bohemia-Moravia. Humankind may be venal, self-deceiving and self-important, and things are never quite what they seem, but there is not a harsh word in the whole book. Indeed, readers coming to it by way of Szerb’s acknowledged masterpiece, Journey by Moonlight (1937), might be somewhat disconcerted by its apparent frivolity. Certain themes will of course be familiar, as will the subtle and pervasive irony, but gone, apparently, are the darker spiritual questionings, the confrontation with inner demons, the brooding sense of psychological determinism; and the manner is now unswervingly playful. What, such readers might wonder, has become of the writer’s high seriousness?

Those, however, who arrive by way of his first novel, The Pendragon Legend (1934), might find it a natural development of Szerb’s earlier, more nonchalant ‘neo-frivolist’ style, his practice of exploring real philosophical questions through the most seemingly irresponsible means. In Pendragon the trick was to parody different forms of popular (English) fiction, and play them off against each other to explore the instability of the self. Oliver VII takes this theme a step further. Licensed perhaps by his reading of Pirandello, Szerb now focuses on the connection between role-play and inner identity in a world where illusion and reality are inextricably confused. As with Pirandello, the formal artifice of the production carries the theme. Venice is treated so stagily that ‘at times the whole scene seems to wobble’. Every major character hides behind some form of disguise — not least the royal hero who, oppressed by convention, plots a coup against his own throne, goes into exile, moves effortlessly into the role of confidence trickster, and ends up impersonating himself. But Szerb is no mere imitator of the Italian illusionist. Whatever casual resemblance there may be to Henry IV , the novel serves a very different vision of the world. What Oliver learns about the self looks not back but forward to the French existentialists, as well as insisting on less fashionable notions of responsibility and integrity.

In fact it is to the preoccupations of Journey by Moonlight —both overt and hidden — that Oliver more directly speaks. The parallels are so many and so pointed it is hard not to see the later novel, for all its lightness of tone, as a return to unfinished business. The progress of the young King sheds more than a passing light on what happens to Mihály, the protagonist of Journey by Moonligh t. Both begin as misfits who feel stifled by convention, yearn for the ‘real life’ of the world ‘beyond the fences’ and contrive to escape by characteristically underhand means. Finding themselves in Venice, they head for its dubious underside in quest of adventure. Events force them to take stock of who they are, what they really want, and where their loyalties lie, and they are forced to choose — between two women, and whether to return to the old life. But whereas Mihály meekly submits to being fetched home ‘like a truanting schoolboy’, Oliver goes back for his own, distinctly honourable, reasons.

The intimate connection with the earlier novel is confirmed by a steady stream of allusions. A character lost in the ‘narrow little backstreets’ of Venice imagines the water swirling blackly in between them, as if ‘still heaving with the forgotten corpses of past ages’—a note more appropriate to the morbidly nostalgic hero of Journey . More usually these echoes are given a farcical twist, as when rotund little Pritanez, the corrupt Finance Minister of Alturia, locked in a room in circumstances of comic indignity, is heard complaining from afar. The description evokes that wonderfully mysterious moment in Journey when Mihály is enchanted by the sound of wailing from behind a wall: ‘There was a profound, tragic desolation in the song, something not quite human, from a different order of experience.’ The echo in Oliver VII verges on self-parody.

Themes are echoed too, only to be re-examined. To take just one example: the adolescent theatricals which, in the earlier novel, shape the adult lives of all their participants like a destiny, are replaced by a set of altogether more adult games, played for different purposes and to entirely different effect. Oliver’s various role-plays are entered into deliberately, with an ever-watchful eye on the consequences. Through them he acquires a fund of insight into both the world and himself and, in distinct contrast to Mihály, he comes to accept the role he has been allotted in life. For him, a man defines himself by doing what his situation requires.

In Oliver VII, Szerb is also seeing off demons that haunted both Mihály and his own younger self. The moral, psychological and indeed sexual confusions that Journey holds up for such unsparing scrutiny, in all their pathos and absurdity, had a painful resonance for their creator. Beneath the surface of the 1937 novel swarms a vigorous underlife of private reference. Mihály, haunted by the dead Tamás, the aloof, pale, fastidious young man for whom he once entertained clearly homoerotic feelings, is very much an alter ego of the writer himself. In real life, at the age of 18, increasingly troubled by his feelings for a schoolmate called Benno Terey, Szerb wrote a novella entitled Who Killed Tamás Ulpius? In it, as Csaba Nagy has shown, he attempted to exorcise once and for all the ambiguous elements in his love for the young man. The tale commits in effect a double murder, of the beloved person, now seen as a malign influence, and of the youthful Szerb himself: it is in fact a kind of joint suicide, one which finds its direct echo in Journey . The 1937 novel seems to suggest that Szerb, both as a Catholic and a newly married man, like Mihály, on his honeymoon, felt the need for an even deeper understanding of what happened, and perhaps a more thorough purgation. So steely is the intelligence at work that the issues are left, in the final chapter, clarified but unresolved, and the hero’s ignominious return to Budapest is yet another self-betrayal, another defeat. The ending of Oliver VII is in direct contrast. While it too leaves us with lurking ironies and unanswered questions — every page of the novel presents a new surprise, and there are signs, for example, that Princess Ortrud may not long remain the convenient ingénue she has so far appeared — Oliver, unlike Mihály, does achieve a capacity for moral action to match the insight he has gained into his own divided self and divided loves, and his relationship with the now-forbidden lover ends in a scene of real dignity.